As an alternative, I would suggest Slicehost:<p> http://slicehost.com <p>I stumbled upon them last week after looking for an inexpensive dedicated server or VPS with root access. They offer slices of 4-processor RAID-1 Linux boxes (with your choice of distribution) for reasonable rates. You can add slices as you grow, up to the point of requiring a dedicated box. This is not a managed service--you have full control over your set up.<p>They are developer centric, appear to have a great community going and have received entirely favorable reviews online (at least as far as I could find). They are very Rails friendly (their interface is developed in Rails), but also support Python, Java, PHP, LISP, etc. With root access, you can install whatever development/server environment you desire.<p>I'm just getting set up, but so far, I have been very happy with their service.
I'd strongly encourage people on this list (who I'm going to assume are technical) to get their own VPS, not a shared account somewhere.<p>I've been very happy with Future Hosting at http://www.futurehosting.biz/. I've got a VPS with Ubuntu on it and we completely control the box. We're paying $25/month for that server.
I have to say this matches my experience with any shared host for a serious web app. TextDrive is super helpful with customer service but not being able to get root on your server cuts off a lot of solutions. <p>So my advice to anyone hosting a Rails app or any other web app would be to go with a dedicated host (where you at least have a virtual server or something)